Make a Simple Garden Pond for Instant Wildlife!
A garden pond gives you instant wildlife!
We dug ours in a day, lined it in an afternoon, filled it with water in four hours and - two weeks later - the wildlife arrived.
Our pond, when first filled with water, looked very raw. A metre deep oval, roughly eight feet at the widest point and six at the narrowest. A couple of yellow flag, some oxygenating weed and a small water lily. We’d turfed the edges down to the waterline but you could still see the butile liner and it looked very, very man made. Awful really.
We left it, as we’d been advised, and seven days later the whole pond turned vivid green overnight. We mixed in a bottle of special stuff and this algal bloom quickly disappeared. After a couple of days the water was clear again and three days later we spotted our first pond creatures.
Within three weeks we had newts and frogs, water boatmen, three kinds of dragonfly, water skaters, water beetles, loads of tiny organisms and larvae. Who knows where they all came from. We live high up in a small suburb built on chalk Downland. It’s very dry and windy. And there are no natural ponds - the chalk’s too porous.
Wherever pond wildlife comes from, it’s amazing how quickly it arrives and settles in. Literally two weeks from digging the hole our pond started to attract all sorts of creatures, out of the blue.
A container as small as a bucket, set into the ground, can quickly become home to frogs, newts and a huge range of interesting smaller beasts. I know a lady who has created a network of tiny, rocky pools in her small garden, each of which is rich and wriggling with living things. One ‘pond’ is ten inches across and two feet deep. Others are smaller and shallower. I know someone else with a small town centre patio and a tiny built-up pond three feet square. Her frogs arrived out of the blue within a week.
Creating a garden pond can be fast and easy. And once you’ve made it, all you need to do is stand back and wait for the pond life-watching fun to begin. You don’t need to go and catch creatures. They’ll find you!
September 17th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
i tryed to make my own pond in my own back garden it took me nearly 6 weeks i just could not get to grips with it, but it came onlong in the end and now it looks brill. It realy stands out in my back garden.